TitleJapanese Beggars
Artist
Robert Frederick Blum
(American, 1857 - 1903)
Date1891
MediumOil on canvas
DimensionsUnframed: 37 × 24 1/16 in.
Framed: 40 5/8 × 27 3/4 × 1 1/4 in.
SignedSigned lower left: "Study by Robert Blum"
Credit LineNational Academy of Design, New York, NY, Gift of the estate of the artist, 1904
Object number109-P
Label TextIn early April 1891, Blum engaged a disabled mendicant priest as a model and began to conceive his canvas Japanese Beggars. By April 8th the figure of the standing priest had been laid on the canvas. Inclement weather and the model’s restlessness, however, caused frustrating delays and the artist’s problems only increased. Blum reported in his diary that it “would have been wiser not to have attempted it at all as I got the canvas in a filthy condition. The place [outside in Tokyo where I was painting the work] was crowded and they swarmed about me like hornets which didn’t help matters.” Blum never completed the canvas during the course of the remaining 14 months of his more than two-year sojourn in Japan.
